Lisa Lazarus Green Lion is Henrietta’s latest book. It’s both a simple story and a multi-layered exploration of extinction, guilt, loss, and desire. At one level, it tells the tale of the last remaining black-maned lioness in the world and her effects on the people around her. One of Henrietta’s great skills, and of course there are many, is that she is an exceptionally visual writer who captures a moment in a strikingly lyrical way. She also, by the way, takes amazing photographs on Instagram. These things seem connected. From insects to lions, that’s quite a shift. Why?

Henrietta Rose-Innes Also, it is a bit of a self-indulgence to write about lions: they are such sensually and aesthetically appealing creatures.

Lisa Lazarus That’s true. The tones of Green Lion and your previous novel Nineveh are fairly different. Whereas Nineveh is, in parts, humorous, and perhaps more hopeful, Green Lion seems more pessimistic in tone. Would you agree? Has your world view become darker? How did it feel to produce these different worlds? (Answer all, none or some of these questions.)

Henrietta Rose-Innes And in this book I wanted to write about idealised, symbolically potent wildlife – unlike the mundane creepy-crawlies in Nineveh. And you don’t get much more potent a symbol than an extinct lion.

Henrietta Rose-Innes Nineveh did have a darkly funny tone, or at least that’s what I was going for … it was quite jocular. The point of that book was that the world turns regardless, things are built and destroyed, and the natural world lives on, often in strange, tough, not always welcome forms.

Henrietta Rose-Innes But in green Lion I wanted to examine the other side of our relationship with the natural world: the fact that we are also rapidly emptying it of many of our fellow creatures. I wanted to write about how, as we lose these companions, we seem to also revere them more, and give them intense, almost religious or fetishistic significance. Many humans are animal crazy in a way we never were when we actually dealt with animals in our daily lives.

Henrietta Rose-Innes And yes, that is sad to me. I’m afraid the book doesn’t offer much in the way of redemption or relief from environmental pessimism.

Lisa Lazarus For example: for the animal group, viewing animal videos is compared with people “saying grace”. It’s spiritual / religious. Of course you’re making a point here about the disparity between the inauthentic (“watching videos of animals”) and the authentic experience. But aren’t people also projecting all kinds of things – their needs, hopes, desires – onto animals?

Henrietta Rose-Innes Yes, indeed. The main character, Con, in particular: he is a lonely figure because of various personal losses he has experienced; and he projects that loss and the desire for connection onto the lioness in his care at the zoo.

Henrietta Rose-Innes Of course this is terrible choice. You cannot fall in love with an animal that mostly wants to eat you.

Lisa Lazarus Compare this from a recent New Yorker article on the eleventh century Japanese masterpiece, The Tale of Genji: “One reason that physical contact between men and women is hardly ever described in “Genji” is that courtly lovers almost never saw one another clearly, and certainly not naked… A male suitor could be driven wild by the sight of a woman’s sleeve spilling out from underneath a shade, or by the mere sound of silk rustling behind a lacquer screen.

Now look at your description of Con feeding Sekhmet, the lioness, her bloody meat: “His communion with the lioness was unpredictable. Sometimes, he was allowed to glimpse only significant parts: a paw, a flank, an eye…he could never see the whole. She’d wait for him to look away, then slip out and snag the meat, pulling it inside or into the shelter of a rock or bush…Sometimes she’d lift her eyes momentarily from her bloody meal to meet his gaze through the glass.”

Lisa Lazarus Can you speak about the erotic in the book and how it seems to manifest in the deeply unfamiliar, the foreign?

Henrietta Rose-Innes I like the idea of powerful glimpses … the lion is particularly frightening and magnetic to Con because she is so elusive. A lion barely seen in the undergrowth is much more terrifying than one you can easily locate. And I think desire is the flipside of that: the strongest lusts are for things not completely seen or comprehended.

Henrietta Rose-Innes The lioness Sekhmet is an illusory desire; Con can never attain her, just as he can’t bring back his mother from death or his childhood friend (who he also desired) from age and physical damage.

Lisa Lazarus But the erotic component in GL seems more than that. When Con has an encounter with Mossie outside the lion’s cage, he describes the effect of the lion – “the spike, the rush, the beating heart” – on both of them.

Henrietta Rose-Innes And he is quite a lonely and emotionally numbed character. he needed to be, in order to want to feel something so badly.

Henrietta Rose-Innes But my characters are always weirder and less likeable than I think they are. I am fond of them and find them completely understandable, but people often tell me they’re strange and unpleasant.

Henrietta Rose-Innes I don’t quite understand my own reasons for choosing a male protagonist this time.

Lisa Lazarus Haha. I don’t think Con is unpleasant, but one does want to shake him out of it. At least I felt that way, at times.

Lisa Lazarus Perhaps you can explore the issues at a somewhat removed level. I think it’s quite helpful as a writer to work via a different gender.

Henrietta Rose-Innes It’s got something to do with the fact that a central dynamic in the book is his unrequited crush on his childhood friend Mark. I wanted to write about the intensity of that kind of adolescent longing and desire; and it was easier for me to write about feeling that for a boy. But I also wanted Con and Mark to be almost doubles of each other. So they are both male.

Henrietta Rose-Innes It’s just a temperamental thing too, really. I do find repressed characters much easier to relate to.

Lisa Lazarus This could take us back to your very first novel Shark’s Egg, which included such a powerful evocation of adolescent longing. Do you find that the well of those intense childhood and adolescent teenage years is still deep for you?

Lisa Lazarus Hang on. In GL, the ‘fence’ is a potent motif. It rings Table Mountain and it divides your Cape Town into permissible and prohibited areas. No South African can see such a fence without a political reminder of our fraught history. Does it have this kind of resonance for you? Or is it more psychological? One can also see the fence as the demarcating of the id: the wild, the ungovernable. It’s an exciting area. The reader is itching for Con to break through the boundary and go on through to the other side.

Henrietta Rose-Innes In the book, Table Mountain has been fenced off by the authorities to preserve the ecosystem up there. A few wealthy people can buy permits for guided tours, however.

Henrietta Rose-Innes Yes of course, it is a hugely loaded symbol. Impossible, in this city and this country, to write about fencing off land and barring people from access without referencing forced removals and apartheid demarcations. I do try to acknowledge that history in the section of the book where an informal settlement is destroyed to make way for the fence.

Henrietta Rose-Innes But although the fence feels powerful, it is in fact revealed to be a bit of a farce, by the end. The mountain is not preserved; the scheme is corrupt and inefficient; it is not possible to control the human and/or the natural world in this managerial way.

Henrietta Rose-Innes Which is also a kind of critique of a kind of bureaucratic style of conservation which tries to remove people from the equation.

Lisa Lazarus Yes. But the meaning of the fence seems to alter. In adolescence, what’s behind the fence is something genuinely terrifying, and tragedy ensues. In adulthood, there is nothing much beyond the fence, and what Con hopes to find there – wildness, perhaps even a roaming lion – is not there. At some level are you making a comment about those life stages, perhaps contrasting the excitement (danger) of adolescence with the dull predictability, and inevitable loss (death), of adulthood?

Henrietta Rose-Innes Although a little girl goes missing, we don’t know why. And I don’t know if there is anything genuinely terrifying behind the fence in the childhood section. I tried to keep it quite ambiguous – we never really are sure if there is a lion on the mountain or not. The real fear is, simply, mortality; and that is what is waiting for Con behind the fence in adulthood too.

Lisa Lazarus You’re a slippery customer, Henrietta. In the best possible way.

Henrietta Rose-Innes But there is a sense too – and I’m thinking this for the first time now – that the fence is a kind of barrier between childhood and adulthood.

Henrietta Rose-Innes Literally: the young, small children can slip through the gaps , and also slip more easily into a world of fantasy and make-believe; once they grow older, the barrier is not so permeable.

Lisa Lazarus And with the soundtrack of heavy rain, we now leave Henrietta Rose-Innes, one of South Africa’s most distinguished writers, as she looks pensively onto a drenched, green English landscape, and eats a chocolate orange.

Lisa Lazarus Good-bye, viewers. Good-bye. Remember, you can experience more of Henrietta by reading her remarkable books.

Bea Reader Our wonderful interviewer, Lisa Lazarus, is a psychologist and freelance writer. She has Master’s degrees in psychology and creative writing, and diplomas in higher education and in information systems. Lisa has co-written three books with philosopher Greg Fried: the novels Paradise (Kwela, 2014) and When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes (Kwela, 2012), and the memoir The Book of Jacob: A Journey into Parenthood (Oshun, 2009). She has written for many publications, including Men’s Health, Femina, Shape, Cosmopolitan, Cape Town’s Child, Psychologies, and Mail & Guardian. Lisa tutors Magazine Journalism, Feature Writing and Memoir Writing for SA Writers’ College.And blogs over here:https://greglazarus.wordpress.com.

Bea Reader And the fascinating and talented Henrietta Rose-Innes is an award-winning novelist and short story writer based in Cape Town (Currently in the UK). Before Green Lion, Henrietta wrote Nineveh (published in 2011 by Umuzi), which followed Shark’s Egg (2001) and The Rock Alphabet (2004). Her story Poison won the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing.http://henriettarose-innes.com.